Natty

In my previous post I followed documentation for VirtualBox to get USB working in my Virtual Machines (VM) and issued the following command: sudo usermod -G vboxusers mike. This command resulted in this error message when I subsequently tried to use the sudo command:

mike is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

I could no longer issue sudo commands – but all was not lost.

I decided to compare the user permissions on my now broken Linux Mint installation to the user permissions on my Ubuntu 11.10 VM that I had just installed (prior to running the command that broke things). I assumed that the settings between the two would be close enough – but given more time I probably have installed Linux Mint in a VM to make the comparison.

These permissions are contained in the file /etc/group and so I used the output from the Ubuntu VM as a guide to fixing permissions in /etc/group on Linux Mint. It should be noted that the Linux Mint and Ubuntu versions of /etc/group are not identical – so pay attention when editing this file.

To edit /etc/group I rebooted and selected the recovery mode option from the grub boot menu. I then chose the option to drop into a root prompt and supplied my user password as credentials.

I then edited /etc/group with nano and appended my username to the entries that I needed to correct.

sudo nano /etc/group

For example, I changed adm:x:4: to adm:x:4:mike. As you can see below the numerical sequence is not the same as for my Ubuntu VM but it is straight-forward enough to see which lines to append with your username.

In Ubuntu 11.4 the traditional notification area has been replaced by a new API called libappindicator. Some applications, such as Shutter, are written in Perl and so cannot easily implement support for libappindicator (which currently just has bindings for C, Python, and Mono).

Ubuntu 11.4 Notification Area

There is a way to workaround this though as Unity maintains a default white-list of applications that are permitted in the notification area.

To see the current notification white-list open the Terminal and type the following:

gsettings get com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist

You should this this command return something like this:

['JavaEmbeddedFrame', 'Mumble', 'Wine', 'Skype', 'hp-systray']

Select the results and copy it into a text editor – add your application to the list and append it to the gsettings set command as per the example below.

Then log off and on and you should see your application in the notification area when you open it.

Shutter Icon in the Ubuntu 11.4 Notification Area

Obviously you can use this technique to remove applications from the notification area too. Just don’t go crazy adding every application under the sun or you’ll suffer notification overload (which this was designed to mitigate).

Unity is the new default interface for Ubuntu as of the 11.4 Natty release. I wanted to take a look at Unity in a virtual machine (to make up my own mind about it) so I fired up VirtualBox on my Windows 7 desktop to take a look.

I already had VirtualBox installed but I made sure that I had the most recent updates installed (currently version 4.0.6).

First download the Ubuntu Natty .iso image and then mount it to a drive letter using Daemon Tools or other similar software. Make a note of the drive letter for later.

Launch VirtualBox and click the New icon and then click Next button to proceed through the Create New Virtual Machine wizard.

Type a Name for your virtual machine and make sure that the OS Type is set to Linux, Ubuntu for the 32 bit version of Ubuntu or Linux, Ubuntu (64 bit) for the x64 version. Click Next.

The wizard defaults to 512MB of RAM for the virtual machine. I elected to up this to 1024MB (i.e. 1GB of RAM). Click Next.

Ubuntu will now reboot – press the Enter key when you see the hardware warning to complete booting into Natty.

I had read here that you should not install Guest Additions to get Unity working – the recommendation was to just install virtualbox-ose-guest-x11 (aka Open Source Guest Additions) and reboot. This did not work for me – so instead I installed Guest Additions along with unity-2d.

To install VirtualBox Guest Additions click the VirtualBox Devices menu and then click Install Guest Additions and follow the prompts.

After that I installed unity-2d (which is available for users who fail to meet the graphical requirements) as follows.

sudo apt-get install unity-2d

I Rebooted one last time and viola!

So I’ll see how Unity works out for me in VirtualBox before deciding whether or not to update my laptop from Lucid. Either way I would anticipate some improvements and polish by the time we get to the next LTS release (which is typically the release than I choose to run).